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After few years of banning my Hubbie for a weekend, making huge mess in the laundry/kitchen room and staying up until the early morning hours I am ready to bite a bullet and get an electric honey extractor.

Anyone has a recommendations on types of extractors that are worth investing in?

There are some new electric extractors for sale on TM from Southland -from caitlins honey . Anyone bought them?

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We have two hobbyist-sized electric extractors - one is the 5-frame Tangential Bottom Drive, and the other is the 6-frame Reversible Tang. Bottom Drive. I'll pop the links to these below - the 5-frame extractor is currently on special too!

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I think it was discussed before however I can not remember the difference between bottom driven and top driven extractors - @tristan may have some good experience with them.

Can someone give a feedback on the Lega radial 16 frames extractor? Thanks.

PS - interesting that the Lega 12 frames radial is bottom driven extractor and $1000 more expensive than the Lega 16 frames radial top driven extractor.

Are the bottom driven ones more stable? Can you operate them on a higher speed and get a better productivity?

bottom vers top driven extractors. i can't say a lot with hobbyist extractors because they are small enough that they can be done a bit different to commercial extractors.

a hobby extractor may have a small enough motor and gearbox that it can be placed underneath easy enough. commercial ones the motor get placed on the side and use pulleys underneath. there is an advantage having weight down low, makes them a bit more stable.

with a small motor i'm not sure on how much advantage that would be.

the advantage with top mount on commercial extractors is that you can use "industrial lego" motors and gearboxes. simple off the shelf parts. plus they are rather wide machines and strong. you don't have the vibration issues of lighter machines.

19 hours ago, Kiwi Bee said:

Can you operate them on a higher speed and get a better productivity?

no.

all extra speed does is rips frames apart. this is why good machines will run slow at the start, then speed up. often 3 speeds are used.

the main things for getting honey out is how warm the honey is, how sticky it is and time. the longer you run it, the drier the frames get.

so its a balance between how much honey you get out vers how many frames you can do.